Luxury travel news and reviews for Mexico, Central America, and South America

Getting Around on the Ground in Style

During the last Passports with Purpose charity drive run by a group of bloggers I won a voucher from Groundlink. This was right after I had just seen a presentation from them at an annual travel tech conference. I got to use it this summer in Mexico City. More on that in a minute.

What really caught my ear during their conference presentation was this line: “We can reserve a car and driver for you anywhere in the world there’s a stoplight.”

Holy crap, that’s pretty cool! If you need a limo in a place you can’t even pronounce, you don’t have to sort through Google results of shady websites. You just contact Groundlink and you’re good to go. Or have your travel agent do it instead—the company pays a commission to agencies.

They’ll get you from the airport to your hotel in style at 2:00 a.m. or arrange a car and driver for days, with an English-speaking driver and a car with plenty of legroom. If you go to their website, you can get a quote for a trip, like the one I put at the top for the Lima airport to a top hotel in Miraflores. Yeah, maybe you can do this cheaper on your own if you hunt around or take your chances at the airport after arrival. But if you want a nicely dressed guy holding a sign up with your name on it—and assurance that the company has been vetted—doing it through Groundlink is worth the money.

So how did my trip go? Well I needed to get my family from the Toluca suburban airport in Mexico City to the main one clear on the other side of town. It can cost as much as your budget domestic plane ticket to do this trip, even in a basic taxi, so I cashed in my voucher and we stretched out. We were in an embarrassingly large SUV with more than enough room for our luggage and our legs. Cold water was waiting for us and the driver spoke like someone who had lived in the U.S. for many years—which he had. It was easy and comfortable. I’ll certainly use them again. You can see customer testimonials here.

If you want to be able to pull up info and book a driver on the go, search for the Groundlink app in the iTunes store.